


Lego-Mouthed Toads

by aureatecunning



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Surreal, documentation of a dream, dream - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:40:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22981897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aureatecunning/pseuds/aureatecunning
Summary: The documentation of a dream that includes being swallowed by Lego-mouthed toads, the commissioning of building and the subsequent inhabitation of multiple entire planets, utter indifference to the death of close friends, and needlessly detailed descriptions of things that seemed important.





	Lego-Mouthed Toads

I had the most incredible dream last night. 

A group of people, I among them, young and ageless as you are in a dream- we had been doing something before this, though I cannot remember it, and a sense of panic still lingered. We found ourselves, our group, who knew each other well and not at all- I do not even remember their names or how I identified them, we found ourselves in a place of impossible, dark greenery. Impossible because this was not a place that green, natural things had any right to grow in, and yet the trunks were thick and the branches wide and sturdy, the way they never are outside of elven fantasy. 

We all knew that these things were not natural for all that they were perfectly imitating, or not even imitating life. These things had grown organically, and the wrongness of such old life here, in this place, at once comforted and repulsed us. 

We were staying still, as in not moving to another place. We were standing, but we felt as though we were fleeing something larger than us, large in the sense an idea is large, and the aura of a person, and the influence of a government. That, I suppose, is the closest I can come to describing it, whatever was trailing us, what we were fleeing from. 

We, males and females, and that was important for all the reasons it was not important-it was so distinctive and comforting and differentiating- we, males and females, youth, drew closer together, drawing away from the huge creatures that leaped the way a wildcat leaps, that pounce, these creatures that leaped and surrounded us in a second. 

They were not the things that we were fleeting. This was a different kind of fear, the simple fear of a predator, and I remember the hysterical humor that had overtaken me as I distantly marveled at my own relief in the presence of something that would eat me. These creatures that pounced like cats, they looked like, and perhaps were huge toads, toads with skin that was slick like frog skin, and they were at once immeasurably huge, larger than houses, I’m sure, and of a rational size. 

I do not know why we did not feel small in that massive wood, and I do not know why the word ‘forest’ feels so wrong to use, but it was that, I suppose. These massive, pouncing, predatory toads that looked at us with their huge yellow-speckled black and green eyes, glinting with a ruthless, horrible mischief, they opened their mouths, and absurdly, I saw that this one in front of me that I describe in such detail, that filled the largest parts of my vision and caused me to press back against the bodies at my sides and behind me; absurdly, I saw that the inside of this creature’s mouth was the color of rich brown wood, and it had no tongue, no teeth. Instead- and this was the absurdity- its mouth, the flat of the inside of its lower jaw, looked like the top of a Lego, smooth and covered with orderly lines of raised, level cylinders, and for a moment they seemed to almost have something written on each flat, reinforcing the Lego-like appearance. 

Once its mouth opened, its eyes went dead, dead the way the eyes of an android, a robot, the lens of a camera is so dichotomously dead and watching. We walked forward. I do not know which of us stepped forward first. Perhaps it was me, perhaps it was not. We walked into its open mouth and it felt like a welcoming, felt like a deliverance.

In an instant, a cutscene that I am sure I lived through but can only remember fragments of, we were in the belly of the toad. Like Baba Yaga’s house, it was, in fact, a house, or at least a living space. We, the group and I stood in a sort of sleeping quarters, and I marveled at the wonder of it. Everything was similar to home, to Earth, almost the exact same except for the pervading sense that something was off. ‘Perhaps the toad was not alive at all,’ I thought, and I was vaguely amused.

I noticed the source of the strangeness, the undeniable unease first, and I voiced it. It filled us with horror, that everything was made of the same unknown material, the wood floor fusing into the soft beds and stone walls, changing textures so that we would not notice. Tricking us. We were terrified and angry, and we knew instinctively that the toad would not spit us out. 

There was a window, though small, and we crowded around it gratefully. The spray of salt, the view, picturesque and filling us with life and hope, was impossible. We were too far from any such body of salty water, and yet here we were. With a collective sense of unwarranted serenity, we raised our faces to that beautiful blue, to the cool air and the wet spray, to that wonder and impossibility, and we travelled across a sea in the belly of the toad.

I do not remember our exiting the toad, though it must have happened, only that in the next moment, I was too numb, too shocked to properly feel despair. The despair that the boy beside me surely felt, and I envied him for it, for the richness of his emotion when he was the same age, I knew, as the me in my dream. Despair, because the toad had disappeared, as things in dreams do when they have served their purpose, and it had left us in front of these previously faceless, unknown things that we had been fleeing. Interestingly, they were human, or at least humanoid, and that set us wrongfooted. 

I felt a closeness, a kinship, grow between me and the man on my other side, as we coldly wondered at our pursuers, as we wondered why they had inspired such fear in us. The muted panic and insidious fear left my dream self then, marking the last time that I would be afraid in thesleep cycle. 

My consciousness blurred out for a while after that, and the next clear memory is of a few of our group, the best of us, standing on a planet. I do not know where we were, only that it could not have been Earth, or an Earth as we had known it. The planet was pure, untainted in every way, and I knew that we were the first to step upon it. 

This unblemishedness made sense, then, because the woods had not been on Earth, with their massive expanse of thick, short, trees. I do not think that we had been a moment on Earth since even the beginning of the dream, though we were surely from Earth, originally. 

Perhaps we were in space, perhaps we were somewhere else, somewhere entirely other; I do not know now, and I did not care then. It was inconsequential.

In front of us stood a man, dressed in robes like a fantasy character, rich and expensive and colorful, and I realized that I felt as though we were equal. Of equal standing or equal ability. He was like us and we were like him, but he was not of us. Like us, and other, in a sense. He was not cut from the same cloth, or stitched from the same thread, or made of the same material as us. Our clothes had also changed, but not to resemble his; Ours were a simple outfit change, a hospitality that he and his had afforded us as guests, or as prisoners, or as travellers. He was indisputably our equal, but he was on a different shade in the same gradient as our group.

It was a dawning realization that our group was smaller. I think that, in the long time that I do not remember, the rest of our group that was not there with us on that planet that had never been touched, had ceased to exist to us. The ambassador departed, polite words and veiled warnings trailing in his wake. We were the best, and the only ones remaining.

As he left, and we turned to one another, pressing close, I realized our exhaustion. We all of us who survived were achingly drained, and I understood in a flash of insight that swelled instead of struck, that we had spent that time that I could not remember extorting those creatures that we had fled from. And they had cowered to us in turn, finding us to be on par with them.

Anything we wished for they would make, and they had given those of us who could stand it a beginning, an empty, rich, and uninhabited planet to do what we would with. They had not made it easy, and I think that we would have taken more from them, forced them to give and be grateful for their losses, but that just doing what we had had fatigued us. We had turned to one another, and feeling a sense of togetherness, we dispersed, each to our own new beginning.

It took no time at all for me to land upon my new expanse, and the movement felt as natural, as easy as walking, but I had not walked and neither had those who had been on that untouched world with me. I remember the singular action of turning my head before my shoulders and waist, and the winsome peculiarity of the sights before me streaking, blurring into striated lines of light and color. It cannot reasonably be done, for a creature to dissipate and cross a distance that amounted to a magnitude and a nothingness, but perhaps it is the nature of dreams to defy reason. 

The dream did continue, although perhaps I have done a disservice by attempting to pin words to any part of it, as I cannot seem to string together any of the words that would accurately capture it’s sharpness and colour. Be assured that the dream was not so fantastical or nightmarish as it sounds. It was pleasant throughout, and felt amusingly realistic, but cannot the same be said of all vivid dreams? 

Regardless, I hold a fondness for this particular sequence of imagined events, and thus concludes my attempt to document it.


End file.
